Docapost DPS

Results

Provided instant scalability – 80 specialists are actively linked, and up to 200 can be involved in the bid process in an instant

Created a single, centralized repository for improved collaboration

Challenge

As part of Docapost (a subsidiary of the French Post Office (La Poste)), Docapost DPS provides outsourced document management services to over 12,000 blue-chip organisations and agencies. Its end-to-end managed services include digital publishing, creation and hosting of electronic archives, secure management of electronic document transfers and direct marketing.

The division has 18 production sites and last year alone managed over 800 million letters, processed 1.5 billion pages and made 3.5 billion pages of archived material available online.

Each year Docapost DPS generates several thousand commercial proposals, many of which are highly complex tender proposals. Commercial managers need to coordinate a matrix of processes and specialists across multiple functions including production, software planning, IT and finance. Maintaining good governance at every stage of the bid process is a business critical requirement.￼￼

￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼￼An internally developed document management process was hampering the ability of teams to collaborate seamlessly. Valuable time was lost in generating approval workflows and the set up of file sharing on the internal network. Docapost DPS wanted to streamline and automate its global bid and tender generation process.

To meet its business objectives, Docapost DPS needed a solution that would allow multiple specialists to share and collaborate with ease. Key criteria for the solution included:

A central repository where users could store, search and collaborate

Full control of access rights to documentations

A detailed audit record of who had worked on what and when, and the decisions taken

Seamless integration with Salesforce

Robust document management functionality including version controls, permissions/roles, and workflows

Metadata management and search capabilities for content

Easy to scale infrastructure

Full compatibility with an existing ISO 90001-quality system documentation repository

Solution

Docapost DPS selected Alfresco as the only solution that offered the flexibility, document management and integration capabilities it needed. With Alfresco, the time-intensive manual processes and data entry would become a thing of the past; participants involved in individual bid proposals could collaborate with ease on documents and maintain full control of edits, permissions and version control. Fast interrogation of the information repository would mean users could respond consistently and efficiently to specific enquiries.

Implementation of the Alfresco solution was undertaken by EI-Technologies, an Alfresco partner specialising in Salesforce integrations. Responsible for development, including the creation of interfaces with Salesforce as well as the LDAP and SSO architectures already in place, EI-Technologies developed the information architecture and configured Alfresco to meet the exact requirements of Docapost DPS.

Today, commercial managers are able to initiate a bid response directly from Salesforce with all relevant fields imported from Salesforce, specialists are automatically alerted and a customized workflow is initiated. The bid team is given instant access to all relevant documentation, with versioning control maintained by selected individuals. Production and financial specialists can generate quotations for each project, together with a detailed breakdown of set up and running costs. Each proposal is managed through a defined approvals workflow before final submission to the customer.

When a customer ‘green lights’ a proposal, commercial project managers are able to instantly generate a new workflow and allocate designated project leads to manage the assignment. All related documentation is archived but remains available to all stakeholders for reference.

Now Docapost DPS has a fully automated bid proposal process that allows multiple personnel from across the business to seamlessly come together and collaborate in the development of a bid response. Each and every step is logged and audited, and a detailed knowledge base of thousands of past proposals is available to support personnel in their decision-making. With Alfresco, the need to file share via the intranet has been eradicated, and the time and expertise of specialists is better focused on the job in hand.

“Setting up an alfresco based document management solution, enabled Docapost to organise all its sales proposal documents in a structured and durable way. About 80 peoples are actively using Alfresco through a dedicated workflow, and 200 can search and access these documents.”— Hubert Cahen, Client Strategy Director with Docapost DPS